Business

One Month in, HuffPo's Streaming Network Is a 'Clip-Generating Machine'

The Huffington Post launched a much-anticipated streaming network one month ago this past Thursday. In that time, HuffPost Live has aired 12 hours of original video per day, five days a week, with more than 2,000 guests appearing on air.

Just as importantly, according to the network's president and co-creator Roy Sekoff, HuffPost Live has turned into a powerhouse for producing shorter segments and clips extracted from these hours and hours of live broadcasting.

"This is designed to be basically a machine to create very large amounts of high-quality content at scale," Sekoff told Mashable in an interview about the network's first month of operations. "We want to create a tremendous amount of content because we want to be able to find the unexpected hit."

Sekoff says HuffPost Live has created more than 1,200 videos and clips to date, ranging from 25-minute segments to shorter, minute-long highlights drawn from broadcasts that have already aired. These clips get funneled to any of the more than 60 sections on The Huffington Post as well as to AOL's various web properties. "That's really where the business lies," Sekoff said. "Creating all that content and being able to put it in places where the eyeballs are."

To put it another way, HuffPost Live has been built to aggregate itself.

In the months leading up to its launch in August, when the service was still referred to as The Huffington Post Streaming Network, some in the media billed it as a competitor to traditional cable news channels, but Sekoff says that has never been the goal. The online streaming network operates differently than cable TV networks in part because of fundamental differences between the two mediums.

Sekoff says that web viewers aren't conditioned to tune into online videos at set times in the way viewers are with TV shows. "That's why we don't do shows," he says. "You don't say, 'Oh, it's 11 o'clock, there must be finance on.'" Instead, viewers can either visit the webpage throughout the day to see what's coming up, leave the network on in the background or else stumble across clips from broadcasts on one of the site's verticals after they've aired.

This raises an obvious question, though: If viewers tend to check out the network's videos after they've aired, why does HuffPost Live need to be live at all? The answer, according to Sekoff, is that the live component is "essential to create engagement," and engagement is the the network's goal. HuffPost Live frequently builds the show around readers of The Huffington Post by inviting commenters onto the network as guests, as well as hosting Google+ hangouts around the live broadcasts.

"We are trying to do something different, something much more social and much more about engagement. That's where we are making our big bet," Sekoff said. "People dont want to be talked at anymore, they want to be talked with — part of the conversation. That's the big difference between cable news and us."

HuffPost Live isn't the only service rethinking the idea of video news. NowThisNews, a similar service from Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer, is planning to start airing videos next month. But Sekoff says the difference between these two services again boils down to the sheer scale of HuffPost Live. "We are a clip-generating machine," he said. "It sounds like they are doing the opposite, generating one or two clips a day and pushing those."

For the time being, HuffPost Live is well on its way to finding an engaged audience. Viewers now spend an average of 12 minutes on-site, and Sekoff says that number is "rapidly" trending upwards. Not too bad considering how uncertain Sekoff felt about the project at the start.

"About a week before the launch, I had the anti-Kevin Costner moment: What if we build it and they don't come?" Sekoff said. But perhaps he never really had reason to worry. Even if viewers don't come to the streaming network he built, the clips will come to them.

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